The NP doesn't work without USER_COMMON defined because at a single point it makes use of the 'which' function. def_user_common is a disaster, though, because it calls get_screen_size(), which forces an X connection to be launched, which means that if you start a remote session and close X IDL crashes. This has been a constant nagging problem and has cost me ~a few days of work. So I commented out the offending (and offensive) line. The worst of it is, I'm not even convinced there's anything that uses any of that information. The common block is only needed to get paths, so which could have been written better. The pipeline ground to a halt for an unknown reason at an unknown point so I added a lot more timing outputs to try to figure out what's going on. Back to the grind...